Perchance to Dream
by Tierfal
Summary: Chronicling the annual suicide attempts of one Draco A. Malfoy, failure.
1. With the Knife

_Author's Note: This is the product of college disillusionment. I am not at risk for suicide, and if you are, please, please, please talk to someone. I am quite available if you need me, and I'd be happy to give you all the help and advice I can offer._

_Also, this fic is rated Mature for a reason—or, rather, two reasons, which are language and violence. Largely violence. You have been warned._

* * *

**Perchance to Dream**

**I – With the Knife**

_You see, they always remember__  
They never forget a face__  
When they cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut you up__  
Cut, cut, cut, cut__  
They remember__  
Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut you up  
Cut you up  
_– "The Killing Lights" – A.F.I. –

It was Draco Malfoy's twenty-fifth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

He'd tried before, of course, but his continued existence testified, quite succinctly, to his lack of success in that particular field of endeavor.

Draco took out his pocketknife, prised open the largest blade, plucked a bit of fluff from the tip, set it down on the table, and folded up the cuff of his sleeve. He considered a moment, and then he went over to the towel rack (as the bathroom was a pitiable shared one halfway down the hall), selected one of his graying towels, arranged it on the tabletop, and set his left arm down on it, his pale skin gleaming faintly, white shot with sapphire veins.

_Up the aisle, not across the… what is it?_

Pensively he weighed his options. A horizontal cut would, one would think, open _more_ veins, but a vertical outlet along a single vein would permit a great deal more in volume to issue from that particular specimen.

Maybe he should try one of each?

_And have a very symbolic crucifix-shaped mark,_ he noted.

He paused.

_Am I comparing myself to Jesus in the process of killing myself?_

There were bad figures, there were miserable figures, and then there were Draco Malfoy's figures.

He sighed, somewhat fondly, and then, with a surgeon's precision, cut a straight, clean line along his most prominent vein.

It hurt.

Like a bitch.

In hell.

On fire.

With a bit of acid thrown in for good measure.

Thinking about it, cutting the morning's grapefruit with a future suicide tool had not been very forward-thinking. Then again, neither had most of the actions and ideas that composed his life.

"Bloody hell," Draco said, and he smiled, because, colloquialism that it was, it quite adequately summed up his existence.

Speaking of blood, it welled, pooled, and spilled, and Draco A. Malfoy, professional failure, ruined another towel.

It was a bit of a pity, because he wasn't exactly rolling in the dough, and towels, like virtually everything in existence, cost money to replace.

Except hearts. Those were a one-time deal. Hit or miss; love or hate; right or wrong; sink or swim; win or lose.

He watched the blood flow, watched it surge and seethe and seep into his forsaken little towel, the stark red fading quickly to a lackadaisical coppery brown.

That was all right with him. The color transition was pretty neatly analogous to the way he felt about life.

More blood poured, gradually and persistently, and Draco started feeling lightheaded. Was that the process that preceded death? Detachment, lightheadedness… then what? Heaven? Hell? Oblivion? Some amalgamation of the three?

Well, with any luck, he'd find out momentarily, though he wouldn't exactly be able to impart his post-mortem wisdom to the masses.

Would it be worth it, he wondered, if there was no promise of anything to follow?

"Draco, hon, are you there?"

His landlady's voice, as guilelessly meddling as ever, tore him from the warm arms of his reverie.

"I'm changing," he announced, knowing as he did that it would only encourage her, as, for reasons he had tried and failed to determine, she had a tremendous crush on him.

"I need to talk to you—about—your—rent…"

There was nothing to say about his rent, but she was unlocking the door anyway, so Draco fumbled with the towel, the fingers of his unmarred hand slipping in the blood—but, as with every event in his pathetic excuse for an unending life, his opponent was faster.

Rosaline screamed, Draco sighed, and ten minutes, a lot of applied pressure, and a great deal of protesting later, he was in the emergency room.

It was an unfortunate part of this tradition that it often ushered in a rousing hospital bill to pay off over the course of the three hundred and sixty-five days until the next attempt.

As he stared up at the sterilized hallway's ceiling lights above, their distant white eyes burning into his, he remembered.

There he stood—there was the young man at the center of this whole maelstrom, around whom this great hurricane spun; transcendent and resplendent, the soot smeared on his cheeks like an extension of his raven's feather hair, his eyes a spot of verdure in a desolate world, magnified by the cracked glass before them. His scar blazed from beneath the ash like a beacon, and he was at Draco Malfoy's mercy.

With a steady arm and a shaking hand, Draco had pointed his wand right at that beacon scar.

_Avada Kedavra,_ he thought, urgently and intently. _Avada Kedavra, Avada Kedavra, AVADA KEDAVRA._

But the rest of him wouldn't obey.

He had to do something. They would kill him. They'd promised it before, and they kept their pledges.

"_Sec—Sectum—_"

His tongue stuck, his hand trembled, and his heart throbbed so hard in his ears that he thought his head would explode—

He didn't hate Harry Potter.

Dear God, why didn't he—why _couldn't_ he—hate that stupid self-righteous martyr son of a _bitch_ Harry Potter?

Enchanted ropes tightened around his ankles, the floor rushed up to meet him, his wand snapped, his nose gushed, and everything went blissfully black.

Once released from the hospital (having consistently repeated a highly dubious story about knife-throwing practice for his carnival routine in order to avoid psychological counseling), Draco returned to the apartment building, surveyed the wreckage of his flat, and started packing.

It was time to move on again.


	2. With the Rope

_Author's Note: Forgot to credit Eltea with the beta work, as usual._

_Uh… happy Easter?_

* * *

**II – With the Rope**

_But if things don't work out like we think__  
And there's nothing there to ease this ache__  
And if there's nothing there to make things change  
If it's the same for you, I'll just hang  
_– "Hang" – Matchbox Twenty –

It was Draco Malfoy's twenty-sixth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Again.

This apartment was slightly ritzier—and consequently slightly more expensive—than last year's model. The rent was straining his pathetically low freelance ghost writer/spellwork consultant/unaccredited (and possibly illegal) apothecary's salary, but he needed it for the rafters.

Draco had embarked on an important errand this morning. He had gone to the hardware store and purchased a length of rope, and he had subsequently gone to the library to attempt to determine how it was one went about tying a noose.

Then he went and bought himself some gelato.

It _was_ his birthday, after all.

He climbed onto his silver step-stool and extended his arms upward, but he couldn't reach the beam. Accordingly, he took his desk chair, set it beneath the desired slab of wood, and arranged the step-stool on the seat. Slinging the coiled rope over one shoulder, he clambered up to the height of the tower and reached for the rafter.

His makeshift ladder shuddered and wobbled beneath his weight, but he swung the end of the rope over and began twisting at it, trying to create that inimitable, highly ominous, entirely distinct noose shape. He hoped his tower wouldn't give way; he might crack his head open on the floor and die.

And dying would defeat the whole purpose of killing himself.

Frowning, Draco tried to thread the rope through its own coils, racking his brain for a clearer image of the diagram he'd studied.

Some people probably wouldn't understand the nuances of the Hope-I-Don't-Fall thing. But really, that was the crux of the whole matter—_hope_. _Maybe_. It was the uncertainty of it. The unexpectedness. Birth was a crapshoot of recombined genes; death was defined either by the whim of a higher power, if you bought into that, or just the weakness and weariness of the ragged body given you at your dice-roll birth; and the interim was chance and chaos. If you looked at it that way, bringing about your own death was the only thing that fell entirely under your control. Why not take it when you got it?

The rope looked about right, or about as close to right as it was going to get. Draco paused to consider it, nodded to himself, and managed to get down to the floor without severely fracturing his spinal cord, and it was there that he sat down at his chipped desk and thought about writing a note.

_Adieu, world; we never would have worked out together_?

Nah. Maybe _It's not me; it's you, you miserable bitch_.

Well, the whole act of suicide kind of expressed that general theme. He didn't want to spell it out.

Maybe he should leave a few wonderfully vindictive words—give them something to remember him by. _I should have put my quill through your eye when I had the chance_, let them figure out who it meant. Everyone would assume it was them, because everyone, some deeper down than others, wanted to be important. There was a wretched significance to the second person of a suicide note, and many of them, against their wills and better judgments, would seize on it.

He paused, pen in hand.

He was making a crucial assumption, and it was probably an erroneous one.

He was assuming that someone would read it.

He put the pen down and looked at it, straight and plain and plastic on his blotter, a delicate gleam of afternoon light icing its angles. There was a quick, simple beauty to it. It might have been enough to make a better man turn back.

Draco Malfoy was so tired of turning back.

Again he bested his poor excuse for a stepladder, and then he positioned his neck within the noose and tugged on it a little to tighten it to fit. Not much happened, but Draco supposed that it probably wasn't much like the movies in real life very often.

He gave it a moment, a moment to settle and to stew, and one of the myriad memories crept up behind him and stifled him with a healthy dose of chloroform.

_Please no._

"It is regrettable—"

_Please God no._

"—that you have not done—"

_Please God please I've never asked for anything—_

"—the single simple thing that I have asked of you."

—_but I'm asking now._

The twine had shredded his shirt, the better to cinch slowly tighter around him and dig tiny thorn-like teeth into his skin.

He didn't feel it.

Draco's mother was already crying, shining, silent tears rolling to the crests of her impeccable cheekbones and racing down to drip unheeded from her chin.

Draco didn't see who it was that held her arm. The only vision that his brain, neurons bursting like fireworks, could process was Walden Macnair raising the glinting sword of Gryffindor and bringing it down in an immaculate arc that ended at Narcissa Malfoy's right wrist.

The blood and the agony and the impossibility made real burned into permanence, a woodcut on the wall of his skull, a marble relief smeared with the color of his soul.

Cruel word, _relief_.

If there was one thing Narcissa had always been—she made no claim to kindness or wisdom, crafted no notions of talent or compassion—it was perfect. Every line of her person was calculated and necessary; nothing was out of place. Pale skin, pale hair, eyes like ice that softened, barely perceptibly, for two men in the world. She was Venus de Milo with a vendetta.

Slimmer, naturally.

But she wasn't perfect anymore. She wasn't whole.

Draco had always thought his admiration of his mother was more aesthetic than Oedipal, but it hardly mattered now. It was far, far, far too late.

The man—relatively speaking—at the heart of this atrocity, idle in the corner, shadows on the vampiric white of his face, smiled a thin, cold, skeletal smile that didn't even try to extend to his eyes.

Narcisssa's scream ceased almost immediately to resonate in the heavy air of the small room, but the pitch had penetrated Draco's chest, and the echoes coiled around his ribs.

If he hadn't been bound, he would have torn the red eyes from the white face with his bare hands, retribution be damned.

He already was.

He kicked the stepstool, and both it and the chair toppled to the floor. There was a jerk, his stomach dropped, and he had a long three seconds to stare down at the new dents in the floor before the rope slipped free and sent his face to their level such that he could examine them more closely.

"Son of a bitch," Draco said.

He didn't move for a long time, and then it was to get up, redistribute the fallen tower of furniture, and collect the rope. He tossed it into his suitcase.

There was always next year.


	3. With the Revolver

_Author's Note: Heh… I hated "Marie Antoinette," if it wasn't painfully obvious…_

* * *

**III – With the Revolver**

_I play Russian Roulette every day, a man's sport  
With a bullet called life  
_– "Sugar" – System of a Down –

It was Draco Malfoy's twenty-seventh birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Tradition was a wonderful thing, wasn't it? Unifying people everywhere with the underestimated power of repeated practice.

On a related subject, what was it that was so attractive about semi-rhetorical questions?

While he was at it, what was the meaning of life, and why was he so absurdly bad at ending his?

He hadn't had that problem with anyone else's.

Guns, despite their plebian Muggle connotations, were beautiful things. Draco put out a hand and ran a fingertip over the contours of his pistol. Beautiful things. Cold and smooth and ruthlessly efficient. Righteous and remorseless. Startlingly self-contained.

He had gone to the library for instructions again—a different library, of course, for a different apartment. With Apparition, it wouldn't have been too much trouble, but he didn't really like Apparating anymore. He avoided it when he could.

He had loaded only a single bullet—an opportunity afforded him by this particular model, about which he knew little more than the fact that such a thing was possible. He figured one was enough. It was very clean, metaphorically, metaphysically, and blood-splatter-on-the-walls-ically. If worst came to worst, he would just lie on the floor with an imperfect gunshot wound until he bled to death. He didn't really have anything better to do.

Well, if he survived again this time, maybe he'd go buy himself a cake. And eat the _entire_ thing.

It was his birthday, after all.

He picked up the firearm, hefted it in his right hand, and then grasped it with both hands, struck a pose, and pointed it at the lamp like a cop in a movie.

"_Bang, bang_!" he shouted.

It was good to know that there was a little bit of child left in him. And, maybe, a little bit of hope.

Hope for cake, anyway.

Thinking about it, rewarding himself for failing another suicide attempt probably wouldn't very well motivate him to succeed.

But… cake…!

No. Nothing was enough to tilt the balance the other way. Not even cake.

Which was saying something.

He put the gun barrel to his right temple and adjusted it there, trying to find a comfortable spot. The sensation fell somewhere between painful, itchy, and luxurious, which wasn't right at all.

He wanted it to be right. That was just about his only stipulation.

Next he pushed the barrel under his chin, into the hollow section outlined like a pale trampoline by his jaw, but it hurt. He started to move to put the barrel in his mouth, but that was just unsanitary. God only knew where _that_ thing had been.

Shooting himself in the heart would result in recoil sufficient to break his wrist; shooting himself in the back was physically impossible unless he suddenly became a contortionist, which didn't look likely… The only thing he had a good, clear shot at was his foot, and he'd done that figuratively enough times to eliminate the option immediately.

Why was _everything_ so much easier in the movies? In a movie, you really just had to _show up_, and you had it made.

So unfair. So drastically unfair.

He set the gun down on the table and contemplated it. Maybe he should assemble some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption that held the gun steadily aimed at his forehead until he pushed the marble that went down a tube that popped a balloon that released a matchbox car that zipped down a track to hit a ball that rolled onto a mousetrap that snapped shut to pull a string that compressed the trigger and splattered Draco Malfoy's brains all over the back wall.

Did he even have any marbles? It seemed he'd lost them all somewhere, long ago and far away…

Morosely with a chance of petulance, he flicked the gun barrel, and a death stick that could have taken the Elder Wand any day of the week spun in a lazy circle.

And then fired a solitary bullet into the decrepit aluminum heating unit mounted on the wall.

The sound of the shot was ear-splitting and spine-shattering, rippling through the blood, rattling the bone marrow, ripping at the tissue of every organ.

"Fuck a duck on a truck stuck in the muck," Draco said blankly.

He would have done it, too; bestiality be damned.

Oh, God, no he wouldn't. _Eugh_.

He dropped the pistol on his bed and went for the other bullets, buried safely in the drawer of his nightstand, the box of which he disinterred. He picked out another one, slipped it into the chamber, twirled the metal cylinder dramatically, and then snapped it back into the gun.

_I don't know if I've fired five shots or six,_ he thought in his best Tough American voice. _So I've got a question for you. Do you feel lucky?_

He touched the gun barrel to his temple again. _Well, do ya, punk?_

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Vaguely disgusted, he tossed the thing on the table again.

A bullet sliced messily into the wall, ejecting a puff of plaster in its wake.

Draco started in surprise, and then he scowled down at the pistol.

"I want a refund," he muttered.

He dragged out his suitcase and commenced filling it—sort of—with his belongings. His landlord would not be pleased about the two bullet-holes in the walls. Moreover, he might apply a meat cleaver to Draco's vulnerable head. And Draco had already composed a detailed treatise about why _getting_ killed wasn't nearly so glorious as killing oneself.

If you wanted something done right…

He stuck his wallet and his not-his-for-much-longer keys in his pockets, jammed his hands in with them, partly so that they wouldn't be lonely, and galloped ungracefully down the stairs.

_Let them eat cake,_ he thought.

Speaking of which, it had been awfully hard to wait until his birthday after seeing the latest "Marie Antoinette" movie with Kirsten Dunst. Did Hollywood have _no_ respect for one of the wildest, most groundbreaking periods of European history? He'd wished he'd been in charge of that cinematic monstrosity, just so that he could fire everyone involved.

He contented himself with the knowledge that they were all going to hell anyway.

What was not so encouraging was the fact that he'd probably meet them there.

He walked into the little bakery on the corner and commenced ogling their wares, wishing it was socially acceptable to press one's nose to the glass. So engrossing was the business of the decision-making that he utterly ignored the cheerfully grating jingle of the bell on the door.

"Draco?" came an airy, half-distracted voice.

Terrifyingly familiar.

He turned and discovered that Luna Lovegood's limpid gray-blue eyes were uncomfortably close. The woman—for they were all, regrettably, though not undeniably, adults now—had no concept of personal space.

Admittedly, Draco's personal bubble had expanded exponentially as he had sunk deeper into solitude, but given how adept Luna had always proved at skipping blithely over boundaries, he figured he was in the right.

The man behind the counter raised an eyebrow. Or his eyebrow. Or half his eyebrow. "Your name's _Draco_?" he inquired, incredulously with just a hint of distaste.

Draco bristled. _Your MOTHER—_

Luna blinked tranquilly. "And I'm Luna Lovegood," she reported. "Is that a problem, sir?"

The man suddenly became extremely interested in some muffins, and Luna smiled absently.

"How are you?" she asked Draco.

"As well as can be expected," he answered.

Luna paused a moment, and then she leaned forward and unabashedly sniffed his clothes.

Draco wanted to die more now than he had an hour ago. Humiliation would do that for you.

"You smell like gunpowder," Luna informed him. "And smoke."

Worst part was, he couldn't punch her out. Not only did he not fancy a battery charge, she was a _girl_.

"Well, you smell like…" he scrabbled for something clever to say, and all his fingers found was the unruffled Teflon surface of Luna's imperturbable calm.

"Love?" she prompted idly.

He stared at her. "Um," he said, "no."

Adding _Categorically not_ seemed superfluous, so he didn't. Even though he wanted to.

"What are you doing here?" she asked placidly, as if she hadn't registered any of the preceding conversation—not that Draco would have been remotely surprised if she hadn't.

"I wanted cake," he explained.

Sagely she nodded. "Me, too."

"What a shock," muttered the guy behind the counter.

They both stared at him, and he pretended that he didn't notice.

"What's your favorite flavor?" Luna wanted to know.

Draco didn't see how that bore any relevance to… anything.

"Chocolate," he answered anyway.

She nodded again. "I tend to like weird flavors," she told him.

Draco didn't think he'd ever been less surprised in his life.

"What kind of chocolate can I get for you?" the behind-counter-dwelling man interrupted, likely eager to send them back out onto the street where they couldn't intimidate all of his customers.

Draco vacillated a little between double- and triple-chocolate, then went for triple.

It _was_ his birthday. And he _did_ have another year to live.

When Luna had bought some cookies, saying that they were for her son—the idea of Loony's offspring threatened to send a considerable tremor through Draco's frame, but he tried to suppress it—they proceeded out to the sidewalk.

"Where are you headed?" she asked.

"Back to my apartment," he told her.

"Good," she decided. "You can have your cake and eat it, too."

Deeply bewildered as he was, Draco felt a little sad when she wandered off around a corner and disappeared.


	4. With the Candlestick

**IV – With the Candlestick**

_Someone save me, if you will__  
And take away all these pills__  
And please just save me, if you can  
From my blasphemy in my wasteland  
_– "Save Me" – Shinedown –

It was Draco Malfoy's twenty-eighth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Consistency was kind of comforting sometimes.

He had considered using a real candlestick. He even had one—one of the bright, shining silver ones that had stood once, pompous, proud, and pristine, on his parents' dining table. It was a lovely thing, and he told himself that was why he didn't want to attempt suicide with it; who knew how he might mangle it or dent it or destroy it completely?

Embarrassingly, it was more metaphor-based than anything else. First off, he didn't like the phallic imagery very much at all, and second, candles were about _light_. About _illumination_. Not about ushering in the depthless, endless, unfathomable darkness that Draco Malfoy sought with such persistence.

Lead pipe? Didn't have one. Wrench? Nope. And those were blunt objects, anyway—crude, cold, unforgiving, and unrefined. How exactly did you go about killing yourself with a weapon like that, anyway? Killing other people, sure; but _yourself_? You'd have to hit your own head pretty hard just to induce unconsciousness; _death_ was a different matter entirely.

There were more sophisticated ways to go.

And easier ways to facilitate going.

Draco set the candlestick down, jammed a tall green candle into it, pulled out an old-school book of cardboard matches, bent three of them beyond repair, finally managed to convince one to catch, and lit the wick. He shook the match out, paused, set it down on a paper napkin, chewed his lip a little, figured a funeral pyre would actually be kind of classy, and left it there.

He sat down on his bed, the mattress springs creaking like a horror-movie door in protest, held out his right palm, and emptied into it half the contents of the cylindrical orange bottle. He looked at them for a moment, the little white capsules he had released, and rolled them around a bit.

It amused him to think that he quite literally held his life in his hands.

Without further ado, he tilted his head back and poured the pills into his mouth. Reaching half-blind towards the nightstand, he found the bottle residing there, and then he washed five and a half doses of sleeping pills down with vodka.

Might as well go all the way, right?

The ornery mattress cradled him for once as he reclined slowly upon it and folded his hands on his stomach. He lay for a long time, watching the candlelight play on the ceiling, the darkness creeping in on the edges of his vision so slowly as to seem tantalizing and almost arrogant.

Arrogant, like someone else he knew.

He closed his eyes, and everything… ceased… moving.

From the fringes of the growing dimness came a voice, faint at first, then progressively louder.

"Draco!"

The undulating echoes that spread through the room were made not by the banging of his heart, but by the banging of a set of knuckles upon the door.

"Draco, I really need something!"

_No one's home,_ Draco thought wearily, cracking an eye partway open to the ambient yellow warmth cast by the candle onto the walls. _Or no one would be, if there was any home to speak of._

"Draco, I know you're there! The landlady told me you were!"

_I'll bet she did, damn her. Couldn't she just tag me and release me back into the wild?_

"You're so _petty_! Let me _in_!"

_I don't think you want that, love._

"Oh, forget it! _Alohomora_!"

The door gave, and Hermione Granger stormed in.

Then she stopped.

"What are you doing?" she demanded stupidly.

It was something of an accomplishment to dumbfound Hermione Granger, but Draco didn't have much opportunity to celebrate.

"Dying," he answered.

He drifted on the ambulance ride, which might well have lasted anywhere from five minutes to an hour; back and forth, oscillating along the timeline like a sine wave, here, and there, and nowhere at once.

If he was dead, he didn't think that this was too bad.

"_Tell me where the fucking Order headquarters is, you fucking Mudblood!"_

_The tears running down her face spark like fire, not like crystal. There is pain in them, yes, but mostly there is anger._

"_I can't _tell_ you; don't you understand that? There's a Fidelius Charm involved, in case you'd forgotten!"_

"_So what the fuck am I supposed to do, Granger? What the fuck am I supposed to tell him, huh? 'Sorry, my Lord; a little old charm got in the way. Oh, well, never mind!'"_

_Something in the flash of her eyes scares him. He thinks, wildly, madly, almost unwittingly, that it is righteousness._

"_I'm not your babysitter, Draco," she spits. "Maybe you should've thought of that before you joined up and got your little club tattoo."_

_He turns on her, his pounding heart threatening to break his ribs._

"_You think I had a _choice?"

"_There's _always_ a choice, Draco!" she shouts at him. "Every minute's another choice, every word's a choice, every breath and every heartbeat gives you another one! Don't you get it? You had a choice then, you have a choice now, and you _always will_! Nothing's set, nothing's predetermined, unless you _consent_ to let it be that way! No one can _make_ you live the way they want you to! In the end, it's _you_ that does the living!"_

_He snatches up the silver candlestick and slams it into her cheek, and the chair to which she is tied rocks for a moment. She falls silent, her head bowed, her eyelids fluttering, consciousness slipping away. A bit of blood dribbles out of the corner of her mouth._

"_You're wrong," he says._

_She stirs, and he touches her matted hair and hears himself whisper._

"_And I'm sorry…"_

He opened his eyes. The color scheme was all in teals and purples and grays, like something the eighties had vomited back up. He couldn't blame the eighties. He doubted it would have agreed with him, either.

A male nurse in blue scrubs with a sheep motif smiled at him, brown eyes warm behind frameless glasses. The announcement was inevitable: "We pumped your stomach… is it Draco?"

He nodded. _Yes, sir. Constellation Boy. That's me._

The smile took on something of ruefulness and a gentle reprimand. "Your friend said you were mixing alcohol and medication…"

_Friend? What friend? Are we talking about the same Mudblood Granger?_

"…which is never a good idea. But you should be all right now. The rest you can sleep off."

Draco closed his eyes again, hearing the soft, almost tentative _beep_ of the EKG fade into the background.

_That's what I was trying to do in the first place,_ he murmured to himself. _Sleep it off. Sleep it all off. Sleep it all away._


	5. Earth

**V – Earth**

_Tilling my own grave to keep me level__  
Jam another dragon down the hole__  
Digging to the rhythm and the echo of a solitary siren__  
One who pushes me along and leaves me so__  
Desperate and ravenous__  
So weak and powerless  
Over you  
_– "Weak and Powerless" – A Perfect Circle –

It was Draco Malfoy's twenty-ninth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Well, he was working on it, at least.

Slowly, slowly, he delved his hands into the soil, curling his fingers. It yielded, gave, admitted him; cool and rich and kind; so gentle, hesitantly painting dark streaks on his skin.

He was possessed, suddenly and irrationally but too completely to ignore, by the urge to smear it on his face like war-paint. To mark himself. To clarify.

Moist clumps trickled through his fingers, raining lightly on their brethren below. It was wet. Welcoming. Primordial. There was a simplicity inherent in it, and an ancient authority carried by all it produced.

Slowly, slowly, tenderly and meticulously, Draco moved around his tiny plot, easing plants from their earthen nests. He had chosen this apartment specifically for this reason—for the tiny gardens, tightly enclosed by white picket fences, that sprawled in all their cramped, miniature glory over the expanses of the roof. He had nurtured his like a child, like a pet, like a lover, with a single-minded sincerity and a whisper of desperation that unnerved the little old ladies in their multicolored gloves. _He just loves gardening,_ they murmured to each other. _Like a phoenix loves a flame._

There was something clean about dirt. It was paradoxical, and it was enchanting.

_I just love gardening,_ he thought. _Like a drunkard loves a tall glass._

He arranged his Earth-given acquisitions in a charming(ly stupid) wicker basket, took it in hand, and started down the stairs. Twenty-nine was big. Twenty-nine was significant. It was the cusp of the next decade, of the _three_ that haunted Christian theology and old magical mythology alike. It was the ushering in of the trinity, of the triumvirate, of the… truth?

Fat chance of that.

Humming "Funeral March of a Marionette," Draco proceeded down to the third floor, unlocked the door to his apartment with muddy hands, and conjured some bluebell flames beneath his waiting cauldron. From there, it was only a matter of following the instructions laid out on the crumbling pages of the old Potions book.

He'd always been good at Potions. It had been one of his few triumphs in school, and it was one of his few refuges now. For a boy who'd sat sucking on a silver spoon for the duration of his childhood, he was remarkably good at crafting things. At putting things together to make something new. Everything had a purpose and a place, and when you obeyed the directions set out before you, it all came together perfectly.

If only life were so simple, right?

Draco Malfoy had obeyed the behests of others for a very long time—his mother's, his father's, the simple and general family dictates of honor and purity and nobility. He'd bowed to them, committed himself to them, given himself to them, heart and soul and mind and form, even when he knew at his core that they were wrong.

He was very good at following directions.

Snape (Draco hadn't even been able to _think_ of him as Severus until many years later, when he had both feet firmly planted in adulthood; a first name made the man seem drastically human and horribly real) had looked over one shoulder at him, coldly.

"When they come," he said, "you will run."

Draco had been wearing a Head Boy badge and a broad smirk. A few of the pebbles of his vast confidence had slipped loose, tumbling down the mountainside, and he'd feared that the boulders would follow.

"Why?" he'd asked.

It was laughable now, yes, but then, with the war and the world spread out before him, he'd wanted to fight.

"Because you are the last of the Malfoys," Snape had responded calmly, "and we'd rather you not die."

The word carried no weight then. It was letters, that was all—marks on a page. _Die_. As if it was _possible_. Dying happened to other people, like cancer and herpes and Squibs. Not to him. Not to the convergence of the Malfoys and the Blacks. Not to the hero's foil.

"I'm not running," he'd declared, standing up straighter, taller, putting his chest out.

Snape had sat down, heavily, in an overstuffed emerald fauteuil. He had put his elbow on the armrest and dropped his head into his hand.

A considerable portion of Draco's composure had shattered in the face of the realization that Severus Snape was many things he hadn't known—old, weak, fallible, and, mostly, just so damn _tired_.

"Then you're an idiot," Snape had concluded.

It certainly wasn't the first time Draco Malfoy had heard it, but this one hit like a meteorite and stuck.

Draco selected one of the plants he'd grown himself, with his two hands and a bit of help from Ma Nature—one of the many things he'd buried there, offered her, only to take it back when it had changed into something else entirely.

The whole process kind of reminded him of zombies.

And just of graves in general.

He'd been to the cemetery more than a few times. Once every few years or so. He had used to worry about encountering his mother there until he'd figured out the infinitesimal nature of the odds. His mother wouldn't come, because she wouldn't want to remember.

When they found him and identified him, he did wonder if she'd stick him in the family plot. They'd put everyone else there, even the ones they'd claimed to have condemned. Eventually, it seemed, everybody with a claim to the bloodline ended up in the Black plot, mourned by stone angels warmer than the survivors.

He'd run into Andromeda once—with little Teddy in tow. He'd almost died, though he hadn't been sure what of.

But she'd ignored him, as she had ignored Teddy's carrying whisper asking who he was.

The question was, if you relinquished your claim at the most basic level—by trying to extinguish your own existence—did you still belong among those who had clung to the bloodline and defended it to the death?

Draco was fairly sure that he, in particular, didn't belong anywhere.

He hadn't partaken in the division of the remaining wealth; he hadn't helped to craft the epitaphs; he hadn't spent a moment more in the house than had proved necessary to collect his things and leave. He hadn't said goodbye, and he hadn't managed to care.

It was hard to care about much of anything when you knew you'd killed Remus Lupin.

Yeah, he was going _straight_ to hell. Do not pass "Go," do not collect two hundred dollars.

It hadn't even been his fault; they'd been in this pulsing fray, in the thick of things, with people everywhere, and he'd aimed for some dumb bitch Auror with nothing to live for, but she'd _moved_, and Remus had looked right at him, right into his eyes, and then—

It had been his fault. Denying it was an insult to the man who'd died for it.

Somehow a thousand sleepless nights didn't seem sufficient to pay the debt. They'd been related, even—by law, but law was enough, wasn't it? More than enough. Kith and kin cut down on the work of a moment.

Less than kind.

There might have been some small consolation to be found in the fact that he'd mourned Lupin more than he had his own father, but he felt greedy reaching for it.

Reaching. If that wasn't the truth. Reaching always, never to grasp, and hold, and own.

He ground one of his dry herbs with the old-fashioned mortar and pestle he'd rustled up. There was something very genuine about the effort it required.

When his liquid masterpiece had simmered happily for fifteen minutes, he put out the flames, gave it ample time to cool, and poured himself a mug.

"Cheers," he murmured.

The first sip was the worst—it was thick and gritty, rife with fibers and filaments and the crunchy exoskeletons of his insect and arachnid victims cum ingredients.

There were things that would have been easier and, depending on your definition of the word, cleaner, but he shied away from cyanide and arsenic. For all their ruthless efficacy, for all their deep-set origin as elements of the Earth, they were tainted with their manufacture, stained by the oil of men's hands, men who distilled and distributed them as a commodity, men who professed to own these things.

Also, they cost money, and Draco was poor as shit.

On the upside, this stuff was fast-acting—he had the shakes in a matter of minutes, and his extremities were freezing just moments after that. It wasn't long at all before he was curled up on the floor, arms around himself, shivering uncontrollably even as sweat like hot glue gathered on his fevered skin and dripped to the floorboards, where the droplets lay quivering.

He thought he was golden—_ha_—until his stomach convulsed, and then it all came back up again.

Including the colorful cereal he'd had that morning, but some details didn't bear thinking about, let alone describing.

The racking shudders possessing his frame jerked him around a few more times, and then he lay still, attempting to apply his rattled brain—which currently resembled a panicked hamster on a loose-axled wheel—to the Herculean task of figuring out what to do next.

He imagined opening the top of his skull, which would surely be attached by a hinge like in the cartoons, and poking it with a probing finger. It made squishing noises but didn't otherwise respond.

This did not bode well for our hero.

Sighing emphatically, Draco dragged himself to his feet, mopped a variety of don't-even-want-to-think-about-it substances from the floor with toilet paper, and went and took a shower.

Then he ate some more colorful cereal, pretending he didn't remember the fate of this bowl's predecessor, and slept.

For the next fourteen hours.

It _was_ his birthday, after all.


	6. Air

_Author's Note: I was actually pretty amused by what I saw of the second Bridget Jones's Diary movie, but I rather doubt Draco's seen the films he judges._

* * *

**VI – Air**

_Down to the Earth I fell__  
With dripping wings__  
Heavy things  
Won't fly  
_– "Tonight and the Rest of My Life" – Nina Gordon –

It was Draco Malfoy's thirtieth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

This was really just getting fucking depressing. Three-quarters of the way up the hill, and he couldn't even _kill_ himself properly?

There was something deeply wrong with him.

_What a failure,_ he thought, stepping forward. _What a pathetic failure._

This one hadn't been easy. Being in public in the first place wasn't one of Draco's specialties anymore—hermit, remember?—and assembling an attempt that would play out entirely in the public sphere was more cowing still.

Also, it had been exceedingly difficult to find a building that was tall enough to splatter him on the pavement, but that wouldn't have so many people milling around it that he'd splatter some of them in the process. Only one person had signed up to be splattered today, and that was the pathetic failure who was currently peeking over the edge of his chosen edifice.

It was kind of funny—how much further it looked when you meant it. When it mattered. When you were about to do a nosedive onto that distant pavement.

_God save me,_ he thought weakly.

God wasn't big on listening to him. Maybe if he got His attention.

_God save the Queen?_ he attempted.

No, it was time to be a man—be a man by giving up once and for all.

There was a joke here, wasn't there?

The newspaper headlines would be fun.

_The Amazing No-Longer-Bouncing Ferret Dies Crumpled on Sidewalk!_

Extra, extra indeed.

He drew in a breath, wiped his palms on his pants, and took another step towards the edge. The wind tugged insistently at his hair, at his clothes, at his heartstrings, and he could almost hear a whiny, nasal voice intoning, _Come onnnnn_.

Though there was always the rather likely possibility that that particular voice belonged to him.

He took two more steps, and then the third released him into empty air.

He almost thought for a moment that it would hold him up.

_I think we've established,_ a small part of him muttered, _that we are not Jesus._

If he was, God probably would have listened with a bit more consistency.

Too bad. Jesus was kind of a cool guy.

The rest of him was coming up with more headlines as he commenced plummeting. He wished he would have been able to wait and see what the real ones were; journalists could be ridiculously creative with stupid stuff like that.

_Draco Malfoy—_

Goodness, the air was cold.

—_Makes Leap of Misguided Faith!_

His eyes hurt.

_Malfoy Heir Dead at Thirty!_

The ground looked really hard.

_Suicide Is the Next Big Thing!_

No, like, _really_ hard.

_Draco Malfoy Seems to Think He's Jesus!_

All right, now _that_ was a cheap-shot.

_You're the One Who Just Threw Himself Off of a Building!_

Before he could retaliate by noting some nasty things about its mother, he heard a spell he'd hated the first time he'd failed to execute it (_ha_), and which he hated even more now.

"_Wingardium Leviosa_!"

Well, hell.

He'd been kind of looking forward to splattering, too; he hadn't tried that one before.

No such luck.

As usual.

There wasn't much time to dwell on his misfortune, though he would rather have enjoyed it, because Pansy Parkinson was lowering him carefully to the ground—which was very solid, but not quite as actively malevolent as he'd begun to suspect—and taking him in her arms.

She was warm. And soft. And she smelled like…

"_Love?"_ the echo of Luna supplied.

_No, _he corrected firmly, _like floral shampoo and a bit of perfume._

And then, wonder of wonders, dream of dreams, she was whispering some sort of soft consolation and running her fingers slowly through his hair, like she had on the train all those years ago—presuming that he hadn't imagined that moment along with his ludicrous mist-made notions of his own importance.

And presuming that he wasn't imagining it now.

People were crying out and calling and crowing their incredulity, refusing to believe that they had just seen a woman rescue a man by pointing a stick at him.

More phallic imagery; blah, blah, blah; Freud would have a field day.

Someone should call the Ministry to send over some Obliviation specialists, but… Draco really didn't give a shit right now. There was only one thing in the wide world that he wanted to do, and that was to lie in Pansy Parkinson's lap and let her stroke his hair forever.

Perhaps this was God's way of nudging him and reminding him that there was, in fact, a heaven, and that it was very likely full of kind and dutiful women who would be more than happy to stroke your hair until the sun burned out and the whole world shriveled away.

That would be Draco's heaven, anyway, at least at the moment.

Pansy's tone was not nearly so soft as her fingertips against his scalp. He wasn't sure whether to attribute its edge to worry or to anger, and, per habit, he didn't really give a shit.

"What the hell were you doing?" she demanded.

After some consideration, he announced, "Trying to fly."

Sarcasm spread its varicolored petals. "How's that working out for you?"

He opened his eyes and smiled up at her. "Better than I expected," he reported.

Yes, Pansy Parkinson had been his first love—at least, the first one to knock him off his feet, send him head over heels, and facilitate bouts of darting into bathroom stalls for a bit of privacy in which to agonize over something she'd done. And you didn't forget the first one. Any chick flick could tell you that.

Ah, so this was the way in which he was valuable to the world: In the meticulous rephrasing of the paltry excuses for messages conveyed by movies with names like "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Bridget Jones's Diary." Clearly, he was a paradigm of human achievement.

It was true, though. No matter how long it had been, no matter how much had happened, no matter what had changed, the first one always touched something very deep within you, and, ever so faintly, that _something_ stirred. It lived there, deep down in the pit of you, tiny and condensed, and it neither grew nor receded. It just… lived. Subsisted. And when you saw her, it moved—only a little, only subtly, only gently, but enough that you remembered and remembered why.

If only Draco himself had that kind of resilience.

But he didn't, and that was why, when he saw the pair of rings on Pansy's finger, something else in him curled up in a corner and cried.

It was probably Blaise, that no-good, back-stabbing, filthy, worthless son of a—

_Bad Jesus,_ something _else_ in him reprimanded firmly.

If that was God, he was going to become a Satanist.


	7. Water

_Author's Note: I was having a pretty shitty day/two days/week/life when I wrote this chapter in particular, which is why it leans in a rather melancholic direction._

* * *

**VII – Water**

_I am my enemy__  
The water's up to the knee  
__I never wanted nothing from you__  
Yes, I do; yes, I do  
My engine's running on dry  
My head's so fucked up inside  
Shut up  
I know  
I said so_  
– "Water" – Breaking Benjamin –

It was Draco Malfoy's thirty-first birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Life was a bitch, but death was her mother.

He leaned over the railing of the bridge, peering into the river. Briefly, he'd considered the Thames, but it was too big—too popular, too public—and it might impart to him something of importance, which wasn't right at all.

Also, who _knew_ what kinds of crap ended up in the Thames?

So when it had come down to choosing, he'd selected this modest little river, which was deep and swift, crossed by traffic via a delightful wooden bridge that would rot away and drop them into the water someday. If any of them had taken enough time out of their commutes to learn to recognize the fair-haired man who frequented the footpath, they made no sign of it.

This was the perfect one. He'd scoped out a great many of them, but this one drew him back again and again, a pale moth to a paradoxical wet flame. This one was relentless and remorseless and nameless and amorphous, like the thing he sought to join; this one was everything he wanted to become.

It lay in a patch of kind serenity, this river did, in a swathe of wilderness that stood trembling at the fringes of civilization, determined to stand but doomed to fall to the axes and the fires one day or another. One day soon.

But not today.

Hands in his pockets, Draco strolled to the end of the bridge, swung both legs over the low concrete barrier, and commenced crunching his way through the dry needles and debris. The trees acted as a shield from the sun, mediating its stifling heat and blinding light both. You could look at the world as it was down here, without squinting, without groping for glimpses of the truth through the shimmering haze rising from the street.

He descended the slope to the water's edge and selected an amenable boulder, which promptly conceded to serve as a stool. He sat awhile, watching leaves drift away in the current's greedy clutches, watching eddies swirl and watching tiny waves tentatively lap the shore. He watched pebbles gleam and ripples wander, watched branches defer to the breeze and shadows play at tag. The river murmured, and he rose to answer.

Slowly, slowly, he waded in.

The water welcomed him, cool and sweet, seeping through his clothes to wrap itself gently around him, soothing fingers sliding on his skin.

What a lovely world it was.

He slogged in deeper, letting the river claim progressively more of his body. Shins, knees, thighs—ooh, _that_ was cold. Icy cold. A little bit refreshing.

But mostly just cold.

His waist, his ribs, his chest—easy and enveloping. So kind.

Shoulders.

Time to let go and let it do its work. It was pulling insistently at his legs now anyway, barely resistible.

_Resistance is futile,_ he thought absently. _Including resistance to making pathetically geeky references._

He smiled.

And let go.

The water twisted him, spun him, whipped him back and forth, buoyed him, bounced him, and then slammed his head into a rock.

He had just enough time to gaze up at the sun winking through the latticework of the leaves and reflect on how much easier it had been for Ophelia. All she'd had to do was go gallivanting around in the branches of a willow, fall, and sink. Oh, some people would tell you she'd done it deliberately, but Draco didn't believe that. He didn't read it that way. The woman was crazy by that juncture. And as Draco had proved again and again and again (and again), killing yourself wasn't easy. It took conscious premeditation and planning. And if you were Draco Malfoy, and the world hated you, it was virtually impossible.

He nodded a little to himself.

And then things went wonderfully black.

And all was well.

Or all was well until Draco Malfoy woke up on a pebbly bank with a bad sunburn and a murderous headache.

He had forgotten a crucial detail. It was this detail that had let Neville Longbottom bounce to safety when summarily defenestrated; this detail that had let Harry Potter plummet to the Quidditch pitch on countless occasions and get back up every time.

Yes, sir; that was where it stood. He, Draco Malfoy, was a fucking wizard.

"Fuckshithell," he said aloud. It felt like someone had scrubbed the lining of his esophagus with steel wool, and the sound of his voice supported the theory.

This was a sorry state of affairs indeed. He was sopping wet, but the cruel sun of the late afternoon had sapped all of the comforting chill from the water saturating his clothes.

Better still, he'd left his wand at home.

"Why, God?" he muttered, feeling like the walls of his throat were rubbing together. And that its surface was covered in tiny steel spikes and hooks. Poisoned ones. With gnashing teeth.

In addition, he was going to peel like an orange over the course of the next few days.

"Bitch," he added vindictively, unsure whether he was referring to God, or to life again, or to the sun, or to his mother for hiding him from all of them.

He heaved himself to his feet only to discover that he had lost both shoes and one of his socks in the course of his waterlogged little adventure. Just before he released a string of expletives of epic proportions, the likes of which probably could have bound the sails of all the ships in the Royal Navy, he noted that he was lucky he'd retained his pants.

_That_ would have been awkward.

As he started back towards the latest apartment, the sun-soaked tarmac nipping and searing the soles of his feet, he generated an endless supply of hoarsely-mumbled insults.

He was soaking his bleeding, beleaguered feet in a pan of the lukewarm water that issued from the cold tap by the time he realized that their object was himself.


	8. Fire

_Author's Note: Or petrol, if you're so inclined._

* * *

**VIII – Fire**

_House is haunted  
I just want to go for a ride  
Out and on  
Before I set this room alight  
Left alone  
Forever and for crimes unclear  
With my patience gone  
Someone take me far from here_  
– "Gasoline" – Audioslave –

It was Draco Malfoy's thirty-second birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Eighth time… no, ninth time, if you counted the Bathtub Incident when he was thirteen… tenth if you added the NyQuil and Lunesta Cocktail he'd whipped up at twenty-one, which had been partly intended to serve the purpose it almost had… he swore there was another…

Well, point was, _a_ time was the charm. There was a charm in there somewhere, if you kept at it long enough. Persistence was rewarded. All he had to do was keep on trying.

And as subtlety had failed miserably so far, this round, he was going to do something so fucking _out there_ that the overstated melodrama of it would kill him, if nothing else did.

Yes, sirree—he was going to stand in a public place, douse himself in gasoline, and set himself on fire.

He ran the risk, of course, of having someone smother him in a blanket, such that he only died after a long and long-suffering hospital stay and a series of skin grafts. But that sounded pretty palatable, actually—suffering. And dying, of course, but that was a given.

He collected his can—which was not the signature red, for that would have been far, far too obvious—and took it on a little stroll to a quiet park.

He didn't want to scar _too_ many young children for life.

It was hot again, and the wet air clung as if it didn't want to let him go. He pushed through it single-mindedly, focusing on the goal and the goal alone. The air really just needed to stop being so ridiculously sentimental and get a life.

Which was kind of ironic, given the circumstances.

It was a beautiful day of the sort that featured in famous U2 songs, but Draco supposed that that was to be expected. It was June, after all. Inching towards full-out summer, making gleeful little springs towards it when you weren't looking. The sky spread in a shade of blue usually reserved for robins' eggs, and the blades of grass resembled shards of emeralds reaching toward it. The whole world looked oversaturated. It was the sort of day you were supposed to pass in picnics and footraces, the sort of day that should have laid loosely bound in daisy chains in your memory, framed by the dandelion fluff distributed by a thousand wishes for other days that were just the same.

A lovely day for a lovely death, then. An idyllic summer's suicide. That seemed appropriate enough.

Draco found himself a small paved square—he didn't want to kill any poor, unwitting plants—and arranged himself approximately in the center. Then he upended the container of gasoline over his head.

It burned. But not as much as existence and indignity.

"_Death's a lark," _Eleanor of Aquitaine remarked in _The Lion in Winter_. _"It's life that stings."_

Truer words never recalled by a thirty-year-old man doused in gasoline and taking a matchbook out of one pocket.

He'd enspelled it to stay dry—of _course_; he wasn't some kind of _idiot_… well, he was, but a special kind—and this specimen of book yielded wooden matchsticks. He'd learned from last time. He was stupid about people, not about things.

The first match caught and flared, and he touched it to his soaked shirt, right over his heart.

Seemed appropriate.

Abruptly, the too-bright world was engulfed, and the pain was nearly unbearable.

Nearly.

Draco quickly began to sympathize dearly with those tried as traditional witches, burned at the stake as the piteous wretches were. It was really just an unpleasant way to go.

Then Ron Weasley tackled him to the ground.

There was a lot of shouting and beating and cursing and uttering of spells, none of which was Draco's doing. He did wonder, however, when Ron Weasley had learned which end of the wand was up. Judging by his ineptitude at school, it was a difficult question.

But—ah, yes, there it was—Weasley had married Granger, and they'd started churning out ankle-biters at first opportunity. She'd probably taught him a few things. Possibly including what a brain was and a few of its primary functions.

Then again, that might require a miracle.

Ron Weasley, the very same carrot-headed lout who was staring in disbelief at the budding suicide attempt he'd stopped before it could flower, had been the first that Draco had tried to forget.

He had good reason, too, for once.

It was during the final battle that it had happened. The last stand. The unmitigated slaughter.

There was something supremely contrived about the first moment, really, heavy with the flavor of Hollywood. Draco had just dispatched some fool Hufflepuff—braver by far than a Gryffindor, trying to play in the big leagues like that—when he heard the keening wail of a woman absolutely and irrevocably bereft.

Draco turned, and he saw one of the Weasleys on the ground—one of the matching ones. There was a terrible imbalance preserved in that moment—as if one of a pair of socks had been dropped, shredded and bloodied, to the floor while the other was still quite serviceable. It didn't make _sense_ that one should wear out first. The lack of symmetry was like a blow to the face.

Bellatrix Lestrange, who had attended family functions and birthday parties galore, who had come bearing presents, who had showered an already conceited little boy with undeserved praise, smirked, turned, and moved on. The hole in the chaos closed again like a wall of water sealing behind her.

There was another vision with the taint of pink stars on a dark marble walk not long later—not far enough removed for the rung-bell resonations of the first to have faded. Again Draco saw it all with the blazing clarity unique to those things that refuse to be forgotten.

He saw his father angle his wand towards Ron Weasley, he saw his father hesitate, and he saw his father lower his arm.

So did Fenrir Greyback.

Curved yellow fangs and fingernails met ivory flesh, and the latter lost the battle. Blood like liquid carnelian frothed eagerly forth, a wellspring of ruby stark against the pale, pale, fragile body from which it rushed in an unstoppable flood.

It was then, voluble throat torn open, black robes ripped, hair matted, face white, that Lucius Malfoy finished a very, very long fall. The consecrated trademark silver of the Malfoy line succumbed at last to unrepentant red.

Once and for all.

"What the _hell_ is wrong with you, you filthy git?" Ron howled.

What felt like an open palm collided with his cheek. Was he being _slapped_?

Good Heavens; this was even more histrionic than he'd hoped.

"Elementary, my dear Weasley," he said, opening his eyes. He couldn't tell as of yet whether or not he still had eyelashes. You couldn't very well see your own _eyes_. It was as feasible as was Ron Weasley learning to utilize the lump of flickering neurons languishing between his ears.

"Oh, really?" Ron prompted. "Elementary how?"

Draco could have answered, "In that you are conducting yourself like an elementary school student," but that would have necessitated a great deal of syllables.

He settled with, "I'm dying."

There was a pause.

"Well, least you could do is to hurry up and do it," Ron said.

"Too late," Draco noted. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

Nope. No eyelashes.

"Now you've gone and botched it," he informed his savior.

"It wasn't _my_ fault," Ron retorted, looking scandalized.

"No sense in denying it," Draco replied equably, gathering himself to his feet and brushing the charred remains of some hair from his arm. "It's not likely to change anything now."

He smiled genially at a dumbfounded Ron (who was beginning to revert to anger, presumably because he didn't know what other emotion would be more appropriate), placed his hands in his pockets, and started off for this year's apartment, leaving a can that was not red lying on the stones next to a ginger-haired hero.

When he got there, he took a bath in burn cream.


	9. And Truth

_Author's Note: Initially, I wasn't too sure about the ending, but Eltea advised me not to change it, and the more I look at it, the more I like it, so I hope you do, too. Thanks for all the support and Draco-love._

_And it's A for Abraxas, like his Grampie._

* * *

**IX – And Truth**

_It's so safe to play along  
Little soldiers in a row  
Falling in and out of love  
Something sweet to throw away  
I want something good to die for  
To make it beautiful to live_  
– "Go with the Flow" – Queens of the Stone Age –

It was Draco Malfoy's thirty-third birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

He was going to do it this time. He was; he was; he _was_. He was going to stop his stubborn heart from beating and his ornery blood from flowing, and his cold, cold eyes would fall closed for the last time.

He couldn't wait, really. It was better than when the Nintendo Wii had come out.

In the year that had passed, Draco had regained his eyebrows, but he had not recovered the powerful will to live he'd had back when twenty had seemed old and beauty and truth were one and attainable.

He sat down at his desk and took out his old, old stationery, the pages of which were jaundiced and curling, the header of which read _From the quill of D. A. Malfoy_.

Mr. D. A. Malfoy himself considered these words for a moment. He concluded that they were exceedingly stupid. First of all "From the quill" was an abysmal way to start any letter, and, on that note, was pretentious on top of anything else. Of _course_ it was from his quill; what else would he be writing with on stationery, a felt-tipped marker? (Admittedly, that sounded eerily like a good idea, but there wasn't time, and he didn't have any felt-tipped markers on hand, so he would have to abandon it.)

Also, he took offense a the fact that this impudent header had nonchalantly reduced him to two letters—D. and A., which could also have stood for Dumbledore's Army, or Devil's Advocate, or Diana's Actaeon, or Dead Auror.

Thinking about it, by some unprecedented feat of stupidity, he'd never realized that his initials spelled out _dam_. Dam indeed, built high and mighty to hold a great quantity of water, likely enough to buckle under the strain and collapse.

Maybe his mother had been smarter than he'd thought.

Meticulously, he crossed out _quill_ and wrote _heart_ in its stead. Then he touched the soft end of the plume to his lips, considered the empty space, and bent over it to write out his final words.

_Curtain call at last  
The stage has grown wearisome  
God, life is a bitch_

If there was anything more appropriate than ending your life with a good haiku, Draco didn't know what it was.

He tore his chosen page from the pack, set it down, put the rest away, and turned to the suitcase lying on his bed.

It gaped at him dumbly, zipper teeth lining its cavernous mouth, and he moved to sneer and then changed his mind.

The faithful case was home to a pocketknife, a length of rope, a gun and a few clinking bullets, a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka (which might well still be good; alcohol liked to evaporate, but he didn't know that it went _bad_), a vial of goop that was _vile_ indeed, a map of the city, a bit of sand, and a book of matches. He knocked back the rest of the pills, added the contents of the vial, washed them both down with some vodka (the pills still stuck on the way down, the little bastards), tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants, cut a few vindictive slashes into his wrists, and with dripping hands draped the rope around his shoulders. He was going to go hang himself from a major bridge, then set the rope on fire.

It was going to be fucking _awesome_.

He made it almost to the door before his vision blurred, his knees gave way, and he became intimately acquainted with the floor.

This was not as dignified as he might have hoped, but he supposed that death, by definition, never really was. Dignity was for the living, who could defend it.

It was warm, and… warm… and…

His eyelids drifted downward.

Then there was a shuffling and a faint creak, and the door whisked open and hit him in the back of the knees.

He opened his eyes fully again and memorized the nearest dust bunny.

_Hello,_ he wanted to say. _And how are you today? Living out a satisfactory dust-filled existence?_

"Draco!" a voice prompted bewilderedly. "Draco, what the hell—"

He closed his eyes.

_His mother laughs._

_Almost in spite of himself, his father joins her._

_And in that moment, Draco feels like a god._

He opened his eyes again, to the sharpening of a dim, quiet room in shades of a color that fell between dark teal and that "moss green" that doesn't really resemble moss in the slightest. He could have sworn there was a fancy word for it—celadon, or something?

Or was that a dinosaur?

There was a silhouette carved in black silk by the window. Draco almost recognized it, but there was something… missing.

Then the figure turned, and it was Harry Potter, a little older, a little softer, and sans spectacles.

"Thank you," Draco tried to say, but what came out was, "You got contact lenses?"

That was life for you. And everyone wondered why he was so eager to get rid of it.

Harry nodded slowly, and Draco nodded reflectively in reply—to _have_ something to reply. "Took long enough," he decided.

"For the kids," Harry said quietly. He had his arms folded, and on anyone else, it would have been a closed gesture, a dismissive one, but somehow he made it welcoming.

Or perhaps that was just the attempted suicide talking.

"How are you feeling?" Harry inquired, his unmitigated eyes on something to the left of the hospital bed. For the first time, Draco looked down and around him. He was connected, by wires and tubes and God knew what else, to a series of machines the functions and purposes of which he couldn't even hazard, let alone fathom. He blinked a bit, and the EKG beeped placidly, as if in response. Like a bass beat underlining his continued life. As if the rhythm to it gave it a reason.

"Alive," he said, which was just about as accurate as answers came.

A ghost (_ha_) of a smile crossed Harry's face. "I should hope so," he remarked.

Draco's fingers worried (_and ha again_) the edge of the blanket, his eyes wandering. "I shouldn't," he replied.

There was a pause, and then Harry leapt into it. Of course, when Harry the Savior of the Known World jumped into pauses, he performed a graceful swan dive the likes of which might earn him an Olympic medal.

Draco did belly-flops.

And sometimes clipped the diving board on the way down.

And usually smashed the breath right out of his chest.

Harry pirouetted on the board and then somersaulted into the air. "Draco," he said, "do you know how we got here?"

"Evolution from monkeys," Draco said.

"I mean this room," Harry clarified.

Draco thought a moment. "Well, I presume you walked, and I presume I was carried."

"Ron told me."

Draco paused and then went splashing into the water, where he abruptly commenced flailing all available limbs. "Told you what?"

Harry looked at him, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes dark and wide and encompassing. "About last time. And then Hermione remembered a few summers before."

Draco didn't really know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything.

His forehead throbbed and then itched, and as he raised a hand, all the tubes and wires and paraphernalia shifted and resisted. He felt like Frankenstein's monster. His probing fingertips found a layer of gauze.

"You split your head open on the floor," Harry explained.

"It figures," Draco observed placidly.

"Eighteen stitches," Harry noted.

"Lovely," Draco concluded.

Harry's eyes took on another layer of verdure yet. "Why'd you do it?" he asked.

Draco hesitated. The others—if they had bothered to ask at all—had wanted to know what was wrong with him. What his defect was, so that they could avoid it. Never _why_.

He licked dry lips and raised a bound hand to touch his collarbones, his chin, his lips. To reassure himself that it was all still there, deliberately marred as it might have been.

"Because every time I opened my eyes," he responded softly, "I saw a world of nothing but hate. Because people killed, and people died, and nobody gave a shit if what they did left someone else crying. Because no one _cared_."

"I care," Harry said quietly.

"I believe," Draco replied, Death Valley acrid, "that you hate me. As does this pathetic, miserable world we live in, which joys in propagating more hatred."

"Love is instinctual," Harry countered calmly. "Hate you have to learn."

"That's comforting," Draco decided. "Do you write fortune cookies?"

One of Harry's eyebrows flicked up and disappeared behind the fringe of his hair. "It's called 'the truth,' Draco."

"No need to get offended," Draco told him, waving a peaceable hand, the tubes and wires undulating. "I think that writing fortune cookies is a noble profession."

"So," Harry retorted, "is living."

Draco stared at him. "Potter," he asked slowly, "did you just make a joke?"

"No," Harry said.

But his mouth twitched.

Three years later to the day, there was a brisk knock on the door of Draco's apartment. Grumbling aimlessly, he pushed his calculations away, shoved his chair back, stood, and went to answer.

The first thing he saw was a very large chocolate cake rather too close to his face.

The second thing he saw was the lettering, which read _Happy Birthday Draco_.

"You forgot a comma," he said.

"Fuck you," Ron responded affably.

"Fuck yourself," Draco returned cheerfully.

"Boys," Hermione warned.

"The same guy did the icing," Luna reported, smiling to herself, or perhaps to all of them. "Who thought our names were odd."

"Can't imagine why he'd think that," Draco mused.

Harry clapped him off the shoulder. Coming from anyone else, it would have been unbearably cheesy, but Harry Potter had powers that the mind could not even begin to comprehend.

"Happy birthday, Draco," he said, even going so far as to pause for the comma.

And it kind of was.

No, it definitely was.

_To die, to sleep—  
To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub,  
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?_  
– _The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_, Act 3, Scene 1


End file.
